COP24- Week 2: a week in review

For my first post, I wanted to give my quick two cents on the second week at COP24, to just speak a bit more generally on my experience, before I got into some more specific postings.  Similar to what Adriana and Dean Husic mentioned in their blog posts, I, too, would have liked to have been able to post throughout the week, but the time restraints of the conference definitely did make it hard to blog at the end of the day. To be honest, most days I forgot to even eat. I’d get a quick power bar in the morning, then, I would go from one event to the next, all day. As soon as one ended, I would be so interested and excited for the next, that I would run on over there, forget to do much else. By the end of the night, we would all just get a bite to eat somewhere and then return back to the apartment to work on some type of finals or blogging. But, now, onto the conference.

If you have been keeping up with others’ posts, or if you are up on the jargon and objectives of the COP24 conference, you know that the Katowice Rulebook was the hopeful outcome of this years COP24 Conference.  If the Katowice Rulebook, or the Paris Agreement, is a term that sounds unfamiliar to you, or you are unaware why that was this year’s objective, let me quick fill you in. Three years ago, COP21, in 2105, was held in Paris, and its product was the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is a joint objective of reducing emissions and combating climate change, forged by nearly 200 countries, most of whom, have very firmly committed to taking the actions needed to not warm the planet greater than two degrees celsius. The Paris Agreement is largely symbolic; while it has objectives and goals, it lacks implementation and accountability. Consequently, the Paris Agreement, along with the deliverance of the Katowice Rulebook, could be the double edged sword this planet needs to combat climate change and deliver on the Paris Agreement Work Programme (PAWP). In large part, on a global scale, not a whole lot has been done since the Paris Agreement, which is why this COP24 is widely seen as a last ditch effort to getting the world and all its countries’ inhabitants, in order with achieving getting in line with the IPCC 1.5 degree celsius report and the pre-industrial carbon levels.

Myself, who really tries to be a glass half full kind of guy, and I think a lot of the other some 28,000 people roaming the halls of the convention center, were having a hard time seeing how any sort of agreement was going to be reached. Throughout all of the plenary, side events, high level meetings, and negotiations, constantly statements were made, that were expressions of discontent and disagreement, both with what has happened since Paris, with respect to countries’ progress in relation to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC’s), as well as countries’ current projections, as to where they will be at when the next global stocktakes place in 2020. This was my opinion, all the way up until I was getting ready to leave to go back to the United States. The last day of the conference, the concluding plenary was supposed to be at 5:00pm. Dean Husic, Adriana, and I were going to attend. Initially, it got pushed back to 7:00pm; I still tried to go to that one. I waited for about 25 to 30 minutes, along with more than a half filled room of others, when it got pushed back again, to 10 pm. At that point, I could no longer stay, and decided to go to the Christmas mart and get some delicious perogies. I had enjoyed more than 30 of them, from the Christmas mart in town, during the few days I was there. I wish I had taken a picture of them so that I could insert it here, but looking back on it, I scarfed them down too fast every time! Anyway, that night I went to bed with some mixed emotions. First off, I was super happy, because my tummy was full of yummy perogies.  Second, I was really bummed that I was unable to be at the closing ceremony because of all the delays, but lastly, I was optimistic. I was optimistic because I knew that with all the delays and postpostments to the plenary, I had a strong feeling that Mr. Gutierrez, the UN Secretary-General was going to deliver an announcement, at some point, delivering some type of a “Katowice Rulebook”. I say this because, if they were unable to reach an agreement, they would have said that at the original 5pm meeting; they would not have delayed it three times, and then another three times after that. Yes, they delayed the closing plenary six times. (I think). My hunch was right, sort of. There was an agreement reached and a Katowice Rulebook was delivered. Where I went wrong was, in that, Mr. Gutierrez did not deliver it and it was not called the Katowice Rulebook. It is called the Katowice Climate Package (KCP). Due to all of the postponements, Mr. Gutierrez had to leave due to prior arrangements; instead, Patricia Espinosa, who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), delivered the outstanding news that the countries worked tirelessly through the night and an agreement had been reached.

While people like Ms. Patricia Espinoza, and others, are saying things like, “This is an excellent achievement! The multilateral system has delivered a solid result. This is a roadmap for the international community to decisively address climate change” and other comments are being made such as, “The guidelines will promote trust among nations that all countries are playing their part in addressing the challenge of climate change.”, I think the real scientists are worried that this is not enough.

While myself, and some of the other climate scientists are worried, I do not want to take away from the Kawotwice Climate Package, because it is a monumental achievement, showing that countries are committed and do realize the significance of climate change. I do, however, want to express my concerns on time. Those concerns being that one, there is not enough of it, and two, as a global community, we are not acting fast enough to being where we need to be. Not where we need to be by 2020, 2025, 2050, 3000, and so on.

That being said, great things came out of the Katowice Climate Package. One of the most significant components of the KCP was the comprehensive transparency framework that it called for. This framework is intended to promote trust between nations, through accountability that each nation, is in fact, doing their part. This along with the global stocktake in 2020 will help to paint a good picture of which countries are and are not upholding their NDC’s. In the area of finance, which was one that I found most interesting, and attended a lot of talks on, which is a very touchy subject for most countries, countries have stated that they will raise investments another 100 billion US dollars, by 2020, to support developing countries.  Countries all across the board, in both the global North and South have amped up their goals for 2025 and 2050 and onwards. More significantly, there was a precedent set, that in 2023, nations will need to converge and agree at the COP2027, on the effectiveness of their climate action the past three years, as well as to monitor the development and implementation of progress and technology so far. It seems the largest achievements have happened in three year increments, COP21, the Paris Agreements, COP 24, the Katowice Climate Protocol, COP27, …. ? Hopefully, at COP27 there will be a real reality check, and some monumental change will actually happen.

Article 6 was the one place that countries could not seem to agree. Article 6 has to do with the development of a new carbon marketplace and is under the category of market mechanisms. This was ultimately the provision that had stalled the negotiations for the last two days of the conference and ultimately delayed the final legislation for more than 24 hours, all to still remain unresolved. The countries that disagreed with it were Brazil most publicly, silently backed by India, and some of the other BASIC countries, who raised concerns of principles of equality and respective capabilities, as well as the transfer of carbon emission allowances. If you would like to read more on the dispute over Article 6, I provided two links.  (https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1028681)(https://indianexpress.com/article/world/paris-agreementglobal-warming-climate-change-poland-paris-rulebook-5495687/)

While the achievement of the KCP is great, I stress my concerns of timeliness, again in closing. What are they going to talk about in COP27? More or less the same stuff that they spoke about in COP24. While all this talking is great, it is talk, and to be blunt, talk is cheap. We need action, and we need implementation. The world needs it! Already at COP24, there was talk that we are not going to meet 2 degrees celsius. Moreover, the IPCC report tells us that 2 degrees is too much, and that we are already at a 1.1 degree rise and rapidly rising! If we know that 2 degrees is too much, and already it seems we are on a derailed train with no hopes of reaching the 2 degree mark, what exactly will the future hold? My first COP convention put a real, but grim, perspective on climate change, the world we live in, and what the future holds for the planet and the people on it. I just hope that awareness, through education, greatly increases in the near future, because I believe that the best way to see actual progress in legislation, implementation, and finance, is through the ground up with the grassroots movements. It starts in local cities and then moves up to the state, and so on, until you are on the world scale. Human kind needs to act fast; we are already seeing the effects of climate change take place all over the world, close to home and far away, and we need to change our ways, drastically, to have any hope of delivering a world to humans, in years to come.